The invention relates generally to the use of wireless peripheral devices with a host computing system.
Peripheral devices such as keyboards, joysticks, and mice have traditionally been connected to a host computer system by communication cables. Data transfer between such "tethered" peripherals and a host computer system have been via these cables. Recently, the use of wireless peripheral devices has emerging. These new peripheral devices may communicate with their host computer system through, e.g., high frequency (HF), radio frequency (RF), or infrared (IR) communication signals.
Before a wireless peripheral device can communicate with a host computer system, a communication channel between the two must be established. Establishment of a communication channel typically requires the host to detect the presence of the peripheral device, and then to exchange identifiers so that the computer system and device may uniquely identify one another for data transfer operations. Wireless devices currently available require users to manually identify untethered devices to a computer system before they may be used. Thus, it would be beneficial to provide an automated and dynamic technique to identify wireless peripherals, and to associate those peripherals with unique identifiers, so that they could establish communication with a host computer system.